Vacation Pictures

Columbia Icefields

Have you noticed how many people post their vacation pictures on social media while they are on vacation?

Recently I have been looking through my social media account and noticed that a lot of people have been posting pictures of where they currently are. Sure some of them are at home and doing things but a lot of them are on a vacation and they are posting what they are doing. Yes, I think it is nice to see a little bit about a vacation but then there are the negative aspects of posting pictures when you are on vacation.

1. Through social media you are letting all of your friends know that you are on vacation. That could be nice but then when one of your friends posts a like or a comment then their friends see that you are on vacation as well.

2. Are you sure that your social media page is only seen by your friends and not by everyone else that is on the same social media. Considering how often the different privacy policies change I wouldn’t want to be posting what I am currently doing.

3. Not everyone can go away on vacation due to work or personal responsibilities. If you are on a lot of vacations you could be just making those people feel even worse about their situation so that isn’t good either.

Now here are some good aspects of posting pictures.

1. You get to see different parts of the world by seeing where people are.

As you are see I don’t have a lot of good aspects of posting pictures while you are on vacation. I agree that it is nice to see some vacation pictures but if you are going to do that do it once you are back from your vacation. Another idea would be to put the pictures into an album on your social media page and then people can look at the pictures how they want to look at them. The other thing is if you are going to post daily pictures again put them in albums so that you don’t fill put everyone’s feed with multiple individual pictures.

It was nice today when I was thinking about writing this post to see a e-newsletter that my husband received from an insurance company. The newsletter was saying basically what I was going to be writing and that is if you are going on vacation wait until you are home to post those vacation pictures. Don’t let the world know that you are on vacation and where you are. By posting all these pictures on an ongoing basis you are telling everyone that your home is empty and you don’t be home for a while.

I love seeing the pictures of where people have gone on vacation but knowing when they are at each airport, hotel, tourist spot and even some meals is a little too much information for me. Remember when you are posting pictures please keep them to a minimum and also put them in albums and then I will look at them when I have the time and don’t have to see each picture as a separate post in my feed.

Note: The picture attached to this blog was taken on a vacation a number of years ago.

Picture requests

I was helping out at a charity event and was told that a community newspaper would like between 1 and 5 pictures to go with an article that was going to be written.

For me, getting between 1 and 5 good pictures during a four hour event wouldn’t be much of a problem or at least I didn’t think it was going to be a challenge. The guidelines were basically people having fun at the event so that is what I based the picture selection decision on after the event. Well after the event we decided to look through all the pictures (350 of them) and pick out what we thought would be the pictures that best illustrated what the event was about. It ended up we came up with 7 pictures that we figured would work. Of course, there were a lot of pictures that I liked but figured that they wouldn’t be what the paper wanted.

Now, this is where it gets interesting for us. We put a page together so that the pictures could be shared at full resolution, because trying to email them around would mean resizing them and losing the quality we figured the newspaper would want. The pictures were then sent via a link to the web page to the lady that was writing the article, as she was the one talking with the newspaper. All of this was required by the newspaper within 48 hours of the event, so we were working under a rather tight deadline which we did meet.

The good news was meeting the deadline until two days after sending off the pictures. The newspaper gets back to us and let’s us know that they wanted pictures of people facing the camera, so that the people in the pictures would recognize themselves in the paper when they saw it. Of course, this does make some sense but it would have been great to know this prior to the event so that I could have made sure I took pictures like that to meet their requests. Well, thank goodness we took lots of pictures because we were able to go back through them again and found a few more pictures that we are hoping that the newspaper will like. What was really frustrating was not having the information about what the newspaper wanted prior to the event and then hoping that we had something to fit their requests.

What I learned from this is if someone wants pictures for a newspaper they need to ensure that types of pictures they are looking for is outlined. Being able to adjust how some of the pictures were taken would have been easy before the event but you can’t move people around after the pictures have been taken and the event is over.

I do love taking pictures are events so now to see which pictures end up being used by the paper. If none of them are used I will be extremely upset but I did learn something. Take lots of pictures and try and always ensure you have people facing the camera just in case you need that type of picture.